Branding costs

Week 9

According to the article written by Bill Chiaravalle, Barbara Findlay Schenck, in the branding process logo creation costs the most, if you don´t include SEO-optimization nor advertising. But in the other article written by Chris Grams, the process of educating your employees costs the most. I would say that the education of the employees costs the most, because they have to get paid while learning and the once who´s teaching also have to get paid, that’s either you or an external person. And remember money equals time.

In both articles they agree on, if you don´t have that much money to spend on branding your start-up you should read books and try to learn how to do it yourself, if you don´t already know how and then take in an external firm. I think that the branding process is super important for the company, as do they, but the difference is, that if you do it all yourself you get “blind”, in my opinion it´s always good to spend some money to have someone else look over your work and give feedback, that I think doesn’t cost as much as if you hand over the hole company branding to an external company. This also applies for the once starting a company and have a degree in marketing or business.

For my project company, hmm…that’s a tricky question. I am the one doing most of the branding for them at the time. I started to work at Brudhäll this summer, they gave me the marketing responsibility to me. I opened Instagram and, note that the owners have been running Brudhäll for 2 years and working there for several, they had posted two, not that good pictures. And when I was asking for any guidelines regarding colours, fonts, flyer and menu styles, there where non. So, I had to start from scratch, with everything. The main problem I had was to get the owners to understand that marketing takes time, and especially if you must come up with everything from scratch.

Since I have decided on working there several summers after this, and marketing is what I study, I saw this as an excellent opportunity to learn a lot. I have been taking Brudhäll as my case in all my projects this fall and I´ve learned a lot already, and I will continue to learn as I proceed to work with their branding and company. Even though I love this field and can’t seem to fill my hunger of information and education, I do not get paid not even with a bottle of wine, well I get study points. This is a very cheap and easy way for Brudhäll to get help to build professional branding and company strategies, I don´t like to brag but I am good at what I´m doing and I put a lot of effort into my projects.

Picture from Brudhäll, summer 2019

I think more companies, especially start-ups should take advantage of the opportunity to have students to help them with their problems, it´s a win-win situation.

But back to the assignment. As looks now, I think they should do almost all their marketing internally since they have me. There are some things I do recommend them to do externally. The main thing that I have recommended them to do externally is to build up working CRM systems, since they do not have any now. Also, I´m constantly working on finding partners that could sell vacation packages and our services to their customers, for example Eckerö Linjen and Visit Åland they are selling nights to Brudhäll but no packages, they are willing to sell also packages, but someone have to have time to get that process started. I´ve also recommended Natalie, the boss, to reach out to bus companies and cruise companies, that aren´t our customers.

Why they should do most of the marketing internally is because, even though I´m not graduated nor an expert, I´m cheap, since I already work for the company, so my hourly wage isn´t that much. And if they would have more partners selling the hotel, those company would automatically market Brudhäll. About the CRM systems, I´m not a programmer neither is those anyone else in the company have those skills, so it´s automatically an external thing they need help with.

Just want to say as a last thing, that in the project for Kundrelationer we are doing a lot of research regarding crm and marketing, so we will hand over a portfolio to them shortly.